Apr 07, 2022 - Sale 2600

Sale 2600 - Lot 280

Price Realized: $ 750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(WEST--SOUTH DAKOTA.) George A. Eastman. Letterbook of an agent for South Dakota land and the Catholicon Hot Springs. 166 pages of retained transfer copies of typed and manuscript letters, preceded by 20 manuscript index pages. 4to, 12 x 9 3/4 inches, original cloth, one edge a bit gnawed, other moderate wear; only minor wear to contents. No place, 12 December 1892 to 15 March 1893
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Additional Details

This letterbook was kept by George A. Eastman as agent and treasurer for two South Dakota real estate firms: Vermont Investment Company (with holdings in Rapid City and elsewhere) and the Catholicon Hot Springs Company (building a spa resort in Fall River County in the southwestern corner of the state).

Eastman writes to a Boston investor on 14 December 1892: "I have no doubt in my mind that we can gather in a barrel of shekels in this deal without risk, as we have passed the point where the future of the Springs can be questioned." One page 118 is a blank loan application to be made out for potential Catholicon investors. On page 161 is a transcribed testimonial letter from a "happy customer" who had taken his wife to the springs with "a very bad case of rheumatism, and today I take her home cured of her rheumatism and her general health better than for many months as a result of bathing in your Catholicon Waters."

Eastman's letters to his firm's president L.F. Englesby of Burlington, VT are considerably harder-edged than his letters to potential investors. A 7 March 1893 letter cautions Englesby that without bonds, the project may be seen as "a Western scheme to raise money, which scheme would have to be thoroughly investigated, whereas if you are supposed to have the bonds in your possession, they would naturally conclude that you had investigated to your own satisfaction."

The real excitement took place just a couple of months after this letterbook ends. Eastman lined up a deal to sell Catholicon, but shortly after leaving town, a previous owner took possession. "Knives and revolvers were drawn, and for a time it looked as though some one would be killed," according to the Sioux City Journal of 18 May 1893.